Day 13: Serengeti to Ngorongoro

We only arrived at our tent in the Serengeti around 7pm on Sunday evening and we were due to meet our guide at 05.45 on Monday morning for a quick cup of coffee before getting back in the jeep to set off at 6am. The aim was to get out into the national park while the animals were waking up and at their most active. It was still dark as we set off. Once daylight broke we saw our first animal of the day: a hyena.

We'd heard some of these in the night, so I was interested to see what they look like. The answer is: quite ugly  

Seeing the sunrise was pretty, though...

...and if you look carefully in these photos you'll see the heads of some lions poking up out of the grass.

They were pretty well camouflaged but our guide was able to drive us closer to them to get a better look.

It was an absolutely amazing experience to see a pride of lions at close range.

We even saw two of the lion cubs playing.

Lions at sunrise - definitely worth getting out of bed for

Leaving the lions behind, we drove past another hippo pool.

There weren't quite as many hippos in this one as the one we saw yesterday, but still quite a few!

It was around 07.30 by this point and we were hungry. As we'd left too early to have breakfast the lodge had provided breakfast boxes for us, which we sat and ate in the jeep.

The next animals we found were a group of elephants.

I was really excited to see a baby elephant

It was so cute!

After that we saw some antelopes whose name I've long since forgotten...

...a couple of warthogs...

...and another ostrich.

Then we came across a group of jeeps clustered together, where everybody seemed to be looking at something. It wasn't immediately clear what.

Then we realised there was a male lion sitting beside the wheel of one of the jeeps!

He didn't seem phased at all by the amount of interest in him.

He wandered around the jeeps before pacing off into the distance.

We realised that there was a second male lion too. Our guide explained that they were brothers, living together because they didn't have their own prides. The second lion looked like he'd been injured in a fight at some point.

It was a great morning for lions. We soon came across a pair of lionesses as well!

While we were watching them their attention was caught by some gazelle in the distance, but in the end they decided they were too far away to do anything about it. A bit like Heidi and Pebbles when they see a pigeon  

We could see that one of the lionesses had a collar on, which our guide explained contained a GPS tracker to help the park monitor the movement of animals.

We had a 24-hour permit for the national park, which meant we needed to eat lunch and leave before 14.30. Before our time was up we managed to see another couple of vultures...

...an antelope in a very scenic pose...

...and a kori bustard, one of the heaviest flying birds in the world.

At some point in the morning we also saw two leopards in a tree, but unfortunately no photos of that; they was so far away that we were only able to see them with the help of binoculars.

After lunch it was time to start making our way out of the Serengeti, via the dusty and bumpy main road.

In total it was around 100 miles from the place we'd been staying last night to where we were staying tonight, so we had another couple of hours of driving ahead of us. As we left the Serengeti, the landscape began to become a bit greener again.

Eventually we reached one of the viewpoints over the Ngorongoro crater which had been totally shrouded in the mist yesterday morning.

Today we had a fantastic view down to the crater floor, which we had a permit to visit tomorrow morning.

What an incredible view

We arrived at our accommodation some time after 5pm. It had been a long day, after getting up just after 5am in the morning!

Tonight's tent had the biggest bed ever!

The bathroom was a little more primitive in that we had to tell our tent attendant(!) when we wanted a shower and then he came and filled a tank up with hot water for us. Once he'd done that, the shower worked perfectly

Perhaps the only criticism of this place was that the tents were quite close together and we could hear everything the noisy American guests were saying.

Oh well, we weren't going to struggle to sleep after the exciting day we'd had. And they were probably going to be woken up by my 05.15 alarm